


brave new world

by embraidery



Category: Wind Will Rove - Sarah Pinsker
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:09:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29651127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embraidery/pseuds/embraidery
Summary: Rosie Clay's many-greats-granddaughter remembers her song.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1
Collections: Purimgifts 2021





	brave new world

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zdenka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zdenka/gifts).



> I hadn't read this short story before I saw you'd requested it and decided to give it a go! A wonderful, thought-provoking piece. Thanks for introducing me, and Chag Purim Sameach!

I first felt the wind on my face when I was twenty-seven years old.

I’m grateful I got to experience wind at all, of course--everyone knows about the generations before us that lived their entire lives on the ship, and I know it’s something special to be the first generation to land on Terra. I just wish I was a bit younger, is all. Some of those little kids skipping out onto the planet looking like it was Christmas morning, or even the babies in their parents’ arms looking totally oblivious--I envy the way they’re going to grow up.

Living planetside is amazing. There were things I had to get used to, of course. In all the old stories from Earth, the sky was blue. The purple sky on Terra was always a little surprising, even though I had never lived under a sky before. For another, no one prepared me for just how alive a planet could be! I’d been to the farms on the ship, of course, but there you could put shoe covers on and take them off as soon as you were done. You never really left the sanitised environment in there. But here--here! Here the dirt and grass and bugs never seemed to end.

The animals were my favourite part, of course. I’d seen drawings of plenty of Earth animals, and I’d petted all the types of animals down at the farm, but it was nothing like meeting hundreds of species of alien animals. I’d never touched something with scales before. I couldn’t have predicted the exact way a snake-like creature slithered against my skin, a layer of cool scales over a body that seemed all muscle.

Anyway--wind. Yes. I was writing this down because I went to an OldTimer’s music meeting for the first time the other day. My mom was always really into it. I like the music, but I’ve never really been able to wrap my mind (or my fingers) around playing an instrument. I wasn’t sure if the meetings were for people who just wanted to listen. But a friend decided to start learning an old-fashioned instrument and wanted me to come along for moral support.

The last song I heard before I left was...oh, what was it called?  _ Wind Will Go? Where We’ll Go? _ Something about wind and going, I think. My mom mentioned it once or twice at home, but I’d never heard it played. Something about it just hooked me. I looked it up as soon as I got back to my room. It turned out my great-great-great-great-grandma loved it, which I thought was a funny coincidence. She recorded a video with her slightly different version of it and talked about the way the song changed through time. She said it made her feel like she was in the wind, even though she’d lived her whole life on our windless ship. 

I could kind of see what she meant, thinking about it. The fiddles raced along like hardly anything on the ship did, where most things were exactly the speed they needed to be. They made me feel like holding my head high and striding into--well, what I imagined wind to be, since I’d never felt it. There was over a century between us, but I could just imagine her standing in the music room, eyes closed against the imaginary wind, maybe standing on tip-toes as she played her violin. (Side note for further research: what is the difference between a violin and a fiddle? She called her instrument a fiddle throughout the whole video, but the included pictures look just like a violin.)

That was years before we reached Terra, but the song stuck with me. I went to OldTimer’s meetings sometimes, when my friend did, and  _ Wind Will Rove  _ was usually the song I’d catch myself humming in the shower the next day. It was the first thing I thought about as I stepped out of the ship and onto the gangplank leading down to our new home. I thought then, and I still think now, that  _ Where We Roam  _ (I can never remember the real name, but Rosie would say any of the names are real as any other) sounds more like the wind me and my great-great-great-great-grandma Rosie imagined than the real thing, with my hair whipped up into a tornado around my face and sticking to my lip gloss. Even so, I think of Rosie and her song every time the wind blows.


End file.
